CMR drive in an external enclosure

Recently had a hard drive in an external enclosure go bad so need to replace it. Began looking into options & supposedly CMR is preferable to SMR drives. Haven't found any single external hard drives where being CMR can be determined so was wondering if I could just buy an enclosure & put say a WD Red CMR drive into it? Not using it for image backups of my system only a large amount of video & audio files long term so want the media to be as reliable & stable as possible. It wouldn't be written to or read from often - only to add new files over time manually - not using RAID or other software. Does this make sense or would a WD Red drive need to be in a NAS?

I bought a couple WD Reds awhile ago when Newegg had them on sale for a good price, and have been using them flawlessly this way for several years now. This photo shows one in an external USB dock, which is the same thing as a USB enclosure. These are for long-term storage, so like you, I prefer CMR.

Reds are probably overkill for this kind of use, but they work perfectly well, they're CMR, and the price was right.



These days I only buy internal drives separately and put them in enclosures myself. I no longer trust the pre-made "external" hard drives because many of them, including more and more of WD's external models, are shipped with the drives encrypted. Even if you don't use a password or encryption, they're tied to a key on the enclosure's circuit board so can't be separated from the enclosure.

When the drive eventually starts to go bad, that makes them a whole order of magnitude more difficult to work with to try and repair or recover your data. I prefer it when the drive can be removed from the case and worked on with traditional data recovery tools.

dg1261 said:

This photo shows one in an external USB dock, which is the same thing as a USB enclosure. These are for long-term storage, so like you, I prefer CMR.
Reds are probably overkill for this kind of use, .......

This is what I had in mind. Idk if they are but perhaps CMR WD Reds will be more stable & reliable. I can't quite make out which brand that is but I was leaning toward Sabrent which seems to be well reviewed, etc.. I've only had enclosures so far but will look into external USB dock as well. Occasionally had some "freezes" when transferring data (toward the end of my previous drive's life) so if a USB dock is any better in that regard I'd def use one. Thanks for the info!

The dock is a Sabrent EC-DFLT that I purchased in 2016, and it's worked perfectly with a number of different drives from 250GB to 8TB.

I'm not sure why the difference, but Newegg says it supports hard drives up to 8TB, while Amazon says the max is 20TB. I've never tried anything larger than 8TB, so caveat emptor.

I use a pair of 8TB drives, one for an archive and the other as a duplicate for backup, with one drive stored in my (small) bank safe deposit box. A bare 3.5" drive just fits in my safe deposit box, whereas a 3.5" drive with external enclosure would not. That makes my dock strategy ideal, since putting each drive in its own semi-permanent enclosure would not fit in the safe deposit box.

dg1261 said:

The dock is a Sabrent EC-DFLT that I purchased in 2016, and it's worked perfectly with a number of different drives from 250GB to 8TB.

I'm not sure why the difference, but Newegg says it supports hard drives up to 8TB, while Amazon says the max is 20TB. I've never tried anything larger than 8TB, so caveat emptor.

Yeah I saw 20TB on that Amazon link - which was the one I figured I would get. Saw some negative reviews on there about drive recognition problems yet overall it has 4.4 out of 5 stars & you haven't had any issues with it. Doubt I will ever need even 8TB let alone 20TB.

Hmm ... I don't know what to make of those Amazon reviews. Most seem to be more recent than my 2016 purchase, and I would assume mine can't be a more recent version of the same product that later buyers got years later.

The alleged problems seem to be all over the place, with no consistency. A few reviews can be discounted, having been posted by buyers apparently unaware that you need to format a blank disk before it can be used, or in at least one case (and perhaps more) from somebody trying to read a WD Essentials drive, which have a reputation for being encrypted. Understandably, a drive encrypted by another enclosure isn't going to be readable by this (or any other) dock.

Still, the bulk of negative reviews are all over the place. Does that suggest Sabrent has a quality control problem? On one hand, the majority of buyers have no trouble. OTOH, I note various listings on Newegg and Amazon will inconsistently say it supports up to 4TB vs 8TB vs 20TB. Even the Sabrent website (which says 20TB) has a currently downloadable user manual that still says it only supports up to 4TB. That's not encouraging evidence of quality control, at least as far as documentation goes -- and if they can't get documentation right, does that say anything about manufacturing?

OTOH, perhaps it's more of a supply chain problem, with a lot of old product inexplicably lingering in the pipeline for very long periods of time -- sometimes years. There's a 2016 firmware update online that purportedly expands the support limit to over 4TB, but even recent buyers reported having to apply that update to use 6TB or 8TB drives. I'm using 8TB drives, and my 2016 purchase needed no firmware update. Apparently mine already had the update when I got it in 2016, but then why are other people purchasing units years later that were not already updated?

I don't know. But I've had no trouble with it, and neither have the majority of buyers, it seems. I guess the lesson is: if you get one, make sure you give it a good workout while it's still within the return period.

The EC-DFLT apparently comes in both fan and fan-less variations. Mine is fan-less. I see some reviews mention that on long disk transfers the hard drive will get too hot and slow down transfers. Again, I haven't had problems, but on this topic I'll tangentially note that WD Reds are supposedly designed for higher temp use (because of their intended use scenario), so Reds may be a good choice for you, anyway.

townsbg said:

Hard drive type doesn't matter. What matters is the internal interface and physical size. If you have a sata interface on your enclosure you have to get a sata drive. One thing about an external drive of a large size I would make sure that it is a single drive and not 2 put together. The only way to get 2 drives to look like one is to use a raid and with that kind of raid if you lose one of the drives you lose everything on both drives. It takes 3 drives to keep that from happening. So really fat ones probably have 2 3.5" drives. I would suspect a 20 TB drive to really be 2. Here are raids explained. RAID - Wikipedia

RAID 1 aka disk mirroring consists of two drives. The 2nd is a mirror of the 1st. If one of the drives fails then you lose nothing. You just replace it and rebuild the RAID. The biggest downside is that you have to power down the computer and drives to do that. Naturally you have to figure out which drive has failed so you replace it not the good one.

For example a RAID 5 setup consists of three or more drives. If one drive fails then it can be hot-swapped without losing any data. After that the RAID array is rebuilt. The biggest problem is figuring out which drive has failed .

If you build a RAID with more than two drives then you provide better safety. For example a RAID 5 setup consists of three or more drives. If one drive fails then it can be hot-swapped without losing any data. After that the RAID array is rebuilt.

What makes you think a 20TB drive is not a single drive? A couple weeks ago I bought a WD easystore 20TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive for $250 at Best Buy for Black Friday. According to CrystalDiskInfo the internal hard drive is a WD WD200EDGZ-11B9PA0.

According to the following post it is a single CMR drive. WD easystore 20TB Shucked. Here's what's inside.

dg1261 said:

Hmm ... I don't know what to make of those Amazon reviews......

I'm going to give the Sabrent w/ a WD REd Plus a go & see how it goes. W/ my only backup of my internal drive not even being recognized now so it's def NOT reliable ext HD for backup purposes any more. Now my 1TB internal HD is acting up & CrystalDisk shows it as "bad" AND it was having I/O errors when I was trying to copy some stuff from it I don't trust it either! How 2 different drives could (seemingly) go bad or fail within days of each other seems near impossible. I'd like to replace it w/ a 4TB drive (to be same size as external drive) but I've discovered the above 2TB issue. From my brief research on that for a non-boot disk apparently it can be done. Will have to study it some more.

As to RAID that's above my pay grade.

Something to think about...before you decide a drive is bad make sure it's not a bad or marginal enclosure. If you think a drive is bad then test another drive in the enclosure.

One time I thought I had several bad drives. After I replaced the enclosure the drives turned out to be good after all.